Yellowstone: Geysers and Hot Springs

This is part two of our trip log to Yellowstone. Probably some of the biggest miracles of Yellowstone are hot springs and geysers that can be found across the park. Different bacteria creates different color textures around hot springs and geysers, bringing lots of contrast and vivid color into the scene. As temperatures change, colors start changing, too, making Yellowstone a truly unique and magical place to be in at different times of the year.

The first image is a hot spring called “Dragon’s Mouth”, which looks like a cave with steam coming out of it. Check out this video on Youtube of Dragon’s Mouth.

You haven’t seen the park if you haven’t spent the time to see the good old “Old Faithful”. I sat my camera on a tripod and shot more than 200 images of this geyser in action. When I started reviewing the images from the trip after we came home, I bumped into this image that has a shape of some odd-looking creature. For some reason, it reminds me of “Fozzie bear” from the “Muppet Show”, but I guess you can use your own imagination :)

This is the “Sapphire pool”, which was my favorite from the park. When I first saw it, I just stood there for 10-15 minutes in awe, staring at the pool and its colors. God’s magnificent creation, this pool is so deep that you cannot see the bottom even if you stand several feet higher. In order to capture this image, I put my camera on a monopod and set it on timer, extended it all the way up and raised it as high as I could. Snapped about 5-6 of these and I like this one the best. As you can see, the bottom is not visible even at this height, which is truly amazing. Don’t be tricked though – this pool might look nice and beautiful, but in fact it boils water at 200 degrees Fahrenheit. I’ve read that 50 years ago people could see geyser eruptions of 100-150 feet high from this pool!

NIKON D700 @ 24mm, ISO 200, 1/80, f/14.0

Another sapphire pool, which I thought was inactive until I stuck my finger into the water…it was a bad idea – I almost burned my finger :)

NIKON D700 @ 24mm, ISO 400, 1/320, f/9.0

This one is called “Mustard Spring” because the surrounding area looks like mustard. It was sitting nice and quiet when I snapped this picture.

NIKON D700 @ 24mm, ISO 400, 1/640, f/8.0

Hot water pouring out of the Excelsior Geyser:

NIKON D700 @ 70mm, ISO 100, 16/10, f/22.0

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About Nasim Mansurov

Nasim Mansurov is a professional photographer based out of Denver, Colorado. He is the author and founder of Photography Life, along with a number of other online resources. Read more about Nasim here.

Yes, I did. It was also very bright during the day and decreasing ISO, stopping down aperture still produced shutter speeds of about 1/100, which was too fast, so I had to hand-hold graduating filters by hand to bring down the shutter speed to 1-2 seconds, so that the water looks smooth. The picture is slightly underexposed though. I wanted to fix it in post-production, but Lola says that it looks fine this way. Should I increase the brightness? What do you think?

If you are referring to Shutter Priority mode, then yes, I do have it. But since there was so much ambient light, even if I used a very slow shutter speed in shutter priority, it would have been overexposed. So, the only solution is to decrease the amount of light coming in by using a neutral density filter in front of the lens…

Shams, unfortunately, I didn’t really have any time to edit the photos in Photoshop. All of the post-processing was done in Lightroom and I only adjusted white balance, contrast and saturation – the rest is how it came directly out of the camera.

As far as EXIF information (shutter speed, aperture, etc), you can still view it as I never take it out from my images. Just save the image on your PC, then open the image via a good image viewer such as ACDSee and you will be able to see the attached EXIF information. Another thing you can do is install a Firefox plugin called “Exif Viewer” and you will be able to view this information by simply right-clicking an image.

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